Walden had to close her eyes to keep her focus on managing the Phoenix, holding the multiple perimeter circles, squeezing the fabric of reality back into place around the bulging holes, and talking to someone at the same time. She’d only seen a brief glimpse of Laura’s white Marshal jacket. “Back left sector,” she managed. “Closest to the big technology display.” That incursion was already shut, but there were two demons left in the sector where it had been, one fifth order, one sixth, both of them well aware of the feast of power just within their grasp. Walden, with her eyes still closed, added: “If there’s anyone from school still in the pub and sober enough, have them go and shore up the wards on the shop. They’re shaky.” She could feel the shoddiness of it, someone’s end-of-the-week rush job to comply with health and safety regulations—not the only one on this street either. You didn’t get serious demon problems in London. There were so many wardings about—some of them still powered by the gigantic installations of magical defences laid down during the Blitz—that surely someone else’s protective spell would catch a problem if yours weren’t quite good enough. But that didn’t work if everyone skimped.

She couldn’t turn her head to see what Laura was doing. But she knew, she knew, that Laura was extremely good. So she wasn’t surprised when the alarming sense of shoddiness in the nearest set of wards began to ease. In a crowded area, defence before attack was common sense, and anyone with a tertiary degree in magic should know how to fix a bad incursion ward. There had been half a dozen magician teachers still at the afterparty, not all of them drunk.

And then she wasn’t surprised, not at all, when Laura stepped into the danger sector, facing one fifth-order demon and one sixth, shortsword shining, power gathering around her solid, muscular form. Danger, murmured the Phoenix, the first thing it had said in a while.

Its tone was almost appreciative. Laura Kenning was an interesting kind of dangerous.